Seven Days in Tehran

The plan was to spend a week in the motherland, exploring Tehran, meeting long-lost relatives, maybe even debunking some cultural stereotypes (hello, neocons). Then the election happened, and things changed

I have dedicated uncountable hours to wondering what it would be like to go to Iran. It's where my parents were born, where my Middle Eastern features wouldn't cause confusion ("Are you Indian? Greek? Jewish? Hinjew?"), and where my compulsive tendency to knock on wood would be inherently understood (inshallah). I imagined that, within minutes of arrival, a sense of self I never knew existed— some secret, tucked-away part of me—would finally get a chance to breathe. (Thanks, Joy Luck Club, for filling my head with crap like this.)

Now, after twenty-seven years of wondering what my motherland is like, I'm sitting in a plane somewhere over Turkey, headed for Tehran. My dad has come with me, because without his superior Farsi and guidance, I'd feel more like a tourist than I'd care to. He has only been back twice, alone, since leaving thirty years ago. My mom: never.

The man sitting in the window seat beside me doesn't say a word for the first seven hours of the flight. He's Iranian, in his forties, and round enough to test the limits of his seat belt. He spends most of the flight fidgeting, moving his footrest down, then up, then down again. Every hour or so, he emits the kind of deep sigh that isn't really intended for him but is more a signal to the rest of us that he's been on better flights. As the plane descends, my dad and I begin mapping out all the things we want to see and do in the next few days. There's the bazaar, the Shah's palace, dinner with my relatives, voting in the presidential election (I can do it! I'm a citizen!), and then—

"Is this your first time in Iran?" the fidgeting man interrupts.

Yes, I tell him.

And just like that, his footrest is forgotten, his too small seat forgiven; he's completely focused on making sure I'm as excited as he is for me. "I have lived outside of Iran for twenty-seven years," he says. "Twenty-seven years! I have traveled all over the world, and Tehran is the only place where my feet feel like they have found the earth." He lifts his window shade and nudges me. "Look, dear. There's Tehran. See how beautiful it is?" I look out the window, leaning into his space, and see thousands of little lights. "You're going to love it," he says.

Our hotel, like other major hotels in Tehran, is government-owned. Before arriving, I'd been warned by just about every person immediately or distantly related to me exactly what this means: They'll be listening. Who they are and why they'll be listening is unclear, but apparently government-owned hotels take a profound "interest" in their guests. Phones are tapped, and the people at the front desk keep a close eye on who's sipping tea in their lobby. To what extent any of this is true I have no way of knowing, but the possibility alone has the effect of making me feel like a paranoid shoplifter every second I'm there. The flowers on our table at breakfast, the smoke detector in our room, the humming A/C vent by the window: all potential locations for bugs and nanny cams. The only time I feel remotely at ease is when I'm watching (state-run) television, because, I assume, the secret agents watching me through the vent would approve. Since it's election week, the (state-run) news channel is running and rerunning 1980s footage of Ayatollah Khomeini casting a ballot while hair-sprayed anchors expound on the importance of democracy.

They say, over and over, how lucky we are to be voting this week.

there's a bit of an obsession with Iranian "youth culture" in other parts of the world, namely the part known as the United States. Two-thirds of Iranians are under the age of 30, and contrary to expectations, they're pretty thoroughly Westernized—they listen to underground music, drink when they shouldn't, care about clothes, and date. So I ask a family friend, Shahlla, to take me out to a popular coffee shop, which is roughly equivalent to a bar in that both ses mingle in a relad atmosphere. When we get there at about 9 p.m., the place is filled with young men in tight shirts sitting with impeccably groomed women, many of whom are wearing green head scarves in support of Moussavi. One has green nail polish, green eye shadow, and a green ribbon tied around her fingers.

We're meeting up with three of Shahlla's old friends from high school. It has been years since she has seen any of these girls, and after they politely volley compliments on how great they all look and strategize about which mosques will have the shortest voting lines, they dive into some gossip.

"You know who looks exactly the same? Mona. She hasn't changed at all."

"Same with Shirin. If she got a nose job, she'd look better."

"She wears makeup like someone from India."

"Did you hear that Arash got married?"

"I got coffee with him and he was wearing a ring, but he said that he wasn't married. He said he just likes wearing rings."

"Please."

Two hours later, a waiter who had not been working our table comes by as we get up to leave. He's wearing a dress shirt buttoned low, revealing a cleanly wad chest.

"Hello, beautiful ladies," he says. "Did the four of you have a nice night?"

"There are five of us," one girl snaps.

"Want me to take a photo of all of you together?"

No response.

"You guys are grumpy," he says. This gets a laugh from two of the girls. Encouraged, he adds, "Where are you going after this?"

"Home," I say, wanting him to go away. He follows us out and, with the ingratiating persistence of a door-to-door salesman, throws some honeysuckled bullshit our way about how beautiful he thinks we are and how happy he is that we came by the café. I turn to exchange eye rolls with the other women, but stop short when I see that they are all looking at their feet…and smiling. "He's harmless," Shahlla whispers to me.

And then it hits me: This is how people here have to flirt. Since man can't openly date, woman grows accustomed to man trying to make the most of each encounter, no matter how mundane, whether she wants him to or not. Man is pent-up. Woman is, too. So woman knows that man has to yell, almost desperately, "Come back soon, beautiful ladies!" as she walks to her car. And man knows that as she walks away, woman is secretly smiling.

Cultural myth debunked, part one: Iranians don't have access to information that is politically subversive, sexy, musical, or otherwise related to the Devil. I'm talking about censorship, friends, and I can say this without hesitation: It's completely arbitrary. Here, the results from a sampling of Web sites I typed into a computer in a completely empty Internet café.

Every night now, thousands of cars are driving uptown, converging on Vali Asr Street, in a show of support for their favorite candidate. The Moussavi drivers have green ribbons on their antennas; the Ahmadinejad ones, Iranian flags. All inch, bumper to bumper, in a cloud of exhaust, honking out rhythmic beeps into the early hours. We drive out among them a couple of nights before the election, roll down our windows, and blare our music as young men on motorcycles weave in between cars. Three women in front of us hang from their car doors, tossing peace signs into the air. Little stuffed animals—monkeys—hang from backpacks and rearview mirrors, a way of mocking Ahmadinejad's looks. "This feels like a revolution," my dad says again.

None of this happened four years ago, because four years ago most people had no intention of voting. Why participate in an election for a government they didn't support? "They're all corrupt," as my aunt says. No, four years ago, people stayed home, took their veils off, played music, watched banned programs on satellite television, cursed the leadership, cursed the economy, and managed to create lives for themselves away from the government. Insular bubbles, these lives. Lives within lives, that's what you had to do.

But this was different. Now the entire country has watched as opposition candidates levied the same allegations against Ahmadinejad that the people had been uttering to themselves in private—that he's botched the economy, that too many social freedoms have been stripped, that foreign policy has turned self-defeating. Because for the first time in Iran's history, a sitting president has taken part in televised debates.

"He has dragged this country to a place where it is full of lies," Moussavi said of Ahmadinejad, with millions watching.

"Even my grandmother, who didn't go to school, knows we have inflation," Mehdi Karroubi said to Ahmadinejad.

"Did you hear what Karroubi said?" my dad's friend Armin says as we weave through the traffic. "He didn't even call him 'Mr. Ahmadinejad' or 'President Ahmadinejad.' He just called him by his last name and told him his grandmother was smarter than him!"

"This isn't normal," my dad says.

This feels like a revolution.

Day four, we leave the hotel, with its nanny cams and unsmiling staff, for my aunt's apartment in the northern part of the city. Our time there is split between sitting in the family room watching TV—everything from BBC Persian (a satellite channel that offers real news) to a Korean soap that's been dubbed into Farsi (recent plotline involves a surprise pregnancy) to a slapstick movie about a group of misfits who accidentally become soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war (the humor is lost on me)—and sitting in the kitchen, talking about the election. I always grab the seat at the far end of the kitchen table so I can stare out the window that faces the courtyard.

"See them over there?" my aunt says, pointing to two girls on the balcony across the courtyard. They're about 16 and look completely bored as they smoke their way through a pack of cigarettes. "They stand out there all day, smoking and talking. What else do they have to do? Nothing." I will hear this repeatedly whenever people describe what young Iranians do with their time. They study unbelievably hard, only to graduate into an economy that has no jobs for them, leaving them trapped inside their parents' homes, secretly dating around until they find someone to marry at the age of 22 so they can move into an overpriced apartment in the city that their paycheck—if they're lucky enough to have one—barely covers; so to escape the stress of their growing debt, they meet up with friends at the local coffee shop, but that won't last long because all of those friends are applying for visas to get the hell out of Iran so that they can afford to live a life, any life, better than this one. So what's left for the people who stay? Nothing.

Cultural myth debunked, part two: In my seven days in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I see…

• fourteen couples holding hands in Mellat Park, six of which are not married

• twelve people who recently got nose jobs and wear the bandages to prove it

• nine people who are willing to discuss the intricacies of Lost

• ten clothing stores selling what can only be described as really skanky dresses

It's a little strange voting in a country that you don't live in, but I've decided to vote for one shamefully simplistic reason—it would be neat!—and a slightly more complicated one—I've always been embarrassed about how much easier my life was compared with my relatives' in Iran (i.e., while they suffered through the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, I was playing Nintendo). So, you know, voting for Moussavi—who seems to have ignited something in everyone I meet here—feels like the least I could do.

My dad and I find a tiny mosque in the section of Tehran known as Darband, in the foothills of the mountains. There are about twenty people ahead of us in line, all of whom appear to be members of the mosque. They chat comfortably, greeting people as they come in. This is a good day, I think to myself. A young man carrying a tray of tea offers a glass to everyone in line. Another man approaches the woman standing in front of us and asks her if he could borrow her pen to write in his vote. "Not if you're going to use it to write 'Ahmadinejad,' " she says. He laughs, she laughs, she gives him her pen. This is a good day.

And then it's our turn to vote. The process involves seven people: (1) A woman in a chador who takes my birth certificate and ID card, looks at them, looks at me, and then passes both documents to (2) a man who sits at a computer and types something with a degree of self-importance that I can only assume comes from the fact that he's the Guy with the Computer. He then passes my stuff to (3) a man who writes down my ID number on a piece of paper and then hands it to (4) another man, who looks at my documents again, just to make sure I haven't attempted some sort of identity fraud since the first woman looked at them. He then passes them to (5) an older gentleman who takes my IDs and writes some numbers down on the presidential ballot. He asks me to place my right index finger on a stamp pad and then stamp the paper. He passes everything to (6) a man who writes some numbers down on a clerical ballot, stamps my finger again, and hands me both ballots so I can write in my votes. I write "Moussavi" with the tortured penmanship of a small child, drop my ballot into the box, and then walk over to (7) an old man who returns my birth certificate and ID.

There. I voted.

We spend the rest of the day driving around, stopping off at other voting locations—large mosques with lines spilling from their doors—to witness the turnout. We watch people wait in the sun, happy to sweat out a couple of hours in this way. I hold up my inky peace sign; four men do the same in response. "Moussavi!" one man shouts into the crowd.

Within hours, the phones are cut off. Internet has slowed to a crawl. Streets are barricaded. Television signals are scrambled. Everyone is forced to sit in their homes, which now feel like bunkers, wondering what comes next. Shut up is the message. We've decided, they seem to be saying.

A neighbor comes to the door. "Did you hear?" she says. "They've captured Moussavi! All the opposition leaders have been detained!" Without phones and with no trust in the (state-run) news, panic is setting in. Sometimes we pick up the phone, hoping it will work, but instead hear only beeping. Sometimes the phone lines magically cross, creating a kind of party line of anonymous voices. "What have you heard?" one voice asks. "They stole our vote," another voice says. "This isn't right."

Two days after the election, Ahmadinejad holds a news conference in Tehran. He sits at a table adorned with flowers and declares victory. When asked about the thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets, he says: "The nation's huge river would not leave any opportunity for the expression of dirt and dust."

By sunday afternoon, the protests are spreading. We head to a rally in Mohseni Square to be a part of it, but armored vehicles are stationed at the corners of the intersection. Standing around each car are about twenty policemen wearing black helmets and shoulder pads and brandishing batons in a way that suggests they're ready to use them. The people in the square are forming into a small crowd, gathering around the vehicles, and staring at the men with batons. An older woman in a chador yells, "You have no right to do this!" All of their helmeted heads turn to look at her.

Something in the way those men are looking at that woman, are looking through and beyond all of us, terrifies me. I'm suddenly aware of just how sheltered my life has been up to this point. I try to make eye contact with one of them. I pick a guard at random and stare, waiting to see if he will look back at me. Maybe if our eyes met, I'd see a glimmer of something familiar in him, something human, something that would indicate that he wasn't here just to hurt us. He never looks my way.

I want to get the hell away from here.

As we leave the square, we walk over to a friend's house to drop off a gift—a last-minute errand at the worst possible time. When we're done, we wait by the gate of his apartment building for a car to pick us up. "Leave the gate open," my dad says to me under his breath. That was the trick, the unspoken rule that had developed during the revolution thirty years ago. When it's Us against Them, Us leave their doors unlocked, so that when Them are chasing Us on motorcycles, Us can run down any side street, open any door, and escape.

A thin man with a mustache and a hole in his shirt comes out and introduces himself as the owner of the apartment building. "Look at this," he says. "See this?" He points to a footprint midway up the gate door. Yesterday, he tells us, a basiji, a member of the paramilitary group, was running after a group of kids who opened this gate door to seek safety. The owner then shut it behind them, just before the basiji had a chance to enter. "He started kicking the gate, saying, 'Let me in! Let me in!' I told him that I would never in a thousand years open this gate for him." A block away, two lines of basijis, wearing army fatigues and bandannas around their heads, are marching into the square.

We spend that night sitting around the television, watching Voice of America. Iranians, with no other outlet, are calling in droves, sharing their trauma. One woman calls in, crying, "How could they beat innocent people? How could they be doing this?" There are clips from the day's protests that VOA plays on a continuous loop as a backdrop to each call. There's one of a man being dragged by a riot policeman while another kicks him. There's the clip of the man with the suitcase again. He's being beaten but somehow manages to run away, suitcase in hand. There's a clip of four riot policemen beating a man. Baton blows to the head. Whack whack whack. This is a hard one to watch, but we bear it because we know, with each viewing, what comes next: The policemen stop whacking and start running away. The camera pans out, and we can see a large group of men and one woman throwing rocks at them.

We watch for hours. The guy gets dragged, the man with the suitcase flees, whack whack whack, the people throw stones.

At about ten, we hear something that makes us turn the TV off. "They're doing it," my dad says. I can hear shouting coming from the courtyard. "It's happening again. Listen."

"Allahu Akbar!" I hear a man shout. God is great.

"Allahu Akbar!" voices respond.

Every night during the revolution, my dad tells me, people would climb onto their rooftops and shout God's name as a way of showing dissent. The thinking was that the Shah's police couldn't drag you to prison for yelling "Allahu Akbar." Now, decades later, people were calling out to God again.

Allahu Akbar.

The voices are spreading. Allahu Akbar. It's a game of telephone. You hear Allahu Akbar, you say Allahu Akbar. Pass it along. Allahu Akbar. Say His name. Allahu Akbar. Use His name as a way of saying everything you can't. Allahu Akbar. That you're hurting. Allahu Akbar. That people are being hurt. Allahu Akbar. That what is being done to those people isn't okay. Allahu Akbar. That the government is not okay. Allahu Akbar. That no matter how hard they try to shut you up, they can't stop these simple words, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.

I fall asleep to the sounds of people calling out in the distance, on and on into the night.

My aunt is driving us to the airport. It's early, and the city is still asleep. Moussavi posters and green ribbons litter the road, evidence of the protests the night before. My dad and aunt are saying very little. The goal this morning is simple: Get out. Last night, my dad sat me down and said that if he were detained at the airport, I should keep walking and not look back. "It would be easier that way," he said.

Now, sitting in the car, I keep thinking about the millions of people who are just as scared as I am, who are stuck here, but who are filled with some otherworldly mixture of strength and heart that allows them to swallow that fear and go out into those streets. "Six more months in Iran and you would have stayed on those streets, too," my dad says.

As we pull onto the highway, we're suddenly surrounded by motorcycles and armored trucks carrying riot police—sixty, by my aunt's count. They're driving back from a night of battling protesters. We're now an unwilling part of this caravan of men who, just a few hours before, would have smashed our skulls for being in a square. There are about twelve of them in the truck in front of us, waiting at a red light. One has fallen asleep on the shoulder of another. One is leaning over the side, passed out from exhaustion. The highway forks, and the guards veer the other way. And through my window, I watch them get smaller and smaller.

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